17th April 2016, New Delhi. A woman sleeps on the floor of a shopping complex in New Delhi, India on the 17th April 2016

Sleeping in the outdoors is common in Asia due to a warmer climate and the fact that personal privacy for sleep is not so culturally ingrained as it is in the West. New Delhi (where most of these images were taken) is a harsh city both in climate and environment and for those working long hours, often in hard manual labour, sleep and rest is something fallen into when exhaustion overwhelms, no matter the place or circumstance. Then there are the homeless, in Delhi figures for them from Government and NGO sources vary wildly from 25,000 to more than 10 times that. Others public sleepers may simply be travellers having a siesta along the way.

PHOTOGRAPH BY AND COPYRIGHT OF SIMON DE TREY-WHITE, photographer in Delhi